David Grossman’s taut novel, Someone To Run With, which was made into a Hebrew-language movie in 2006 by Oded Davidoff, will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, Nov. 1, at 5 p.m. at the SilverCity theatre in Richmond Hill.
Bar Belfer plays Tamar in Someone to Run With.
David
Grossman’s taut novel, Someone To Run With, which was made into a
Hebrew-language movie in 2006 by Oded Davidoff, will be screened by
the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, Nov. 1, at 5 p.m. at the
SilverCity theatre in Richmond Hill.
Bar Belfer plays Tamar in Someone to Run With.
Davidoff’s film, set mainly in Jerusalem in the 1990s, is at once grim and elegiac, turning on two young Israelis who fall romantically into each other’s arms thanks to a lost golden Labrador dog found wandering the city streets.
Assaf (Yonatan Bar-Or), a shy and awkward 17-year-old, is asked to track down Dinka, the frisky hound in question. She belongs to Tamar (Bar Belfer), 16, a gifted musician and singer who has run away from home for reasons that are never explained.
Nearly two hours in length, the film shifts seamlessly between Assaf and Tamar. As Assaf leads Dinka along on a leash, he gets closer to piecing together Tamar’s story, but he also elicits the interest of the police drug squad.
A guitar slung over her shoulder, Tamar wanders around Jerusalem, playing and singing to survive. Her songs are sweet, plaintive, soulful and mature beyond her years.
Requiring shelter, she finds refuge in a seedy halfway house presided over by Pesach (Tzahi Grad), a disreputable, tyrannical figure who brooks no dissent or, supposedly, drugs.
The place is filled with misfits, including Shelly (Rinat Matatov), an older woman who befriends Tamar, and Shai (Yuval Mendelson), a brilliant but spaced-out guitarist.
In documenting Assaf’s quest to find Tamar, Davidoff takes a viewer into the dark underbelly of Jerusalem, inhabited by the rejects of society. This is definitely not Naomi Shemer’s mythical Jerusalem of Gold, to say the least.
The best thing about Someone To Run With is the enormously talented actress who portrays Tamar.
A luminous presence whose eyes and voice command immediate attention, Belfer is the glue that holds this generally poignant film together.
Though modest in scope, Someone To Run With covers a lot of ground.
